Emotional Design

By Donald A. Norman

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Summary

In Emotional Design, Norman again discusses the design of the things around us. This time it is focused on the emotions contained within designs and the emotions evoked by designs.

People invariably interpret objects as if they have emotions, it does not matter whether they are animate or inanimate. Because of this, designers should consider this when working on their new creations. Especially for games, movies, music, and robots. Emotion can easily be added to these mediums and are, in fact, necessary if the product is going to be successful.

In the beginning of the book, Norman discusses the impact a design can have on our emotions. A design impacts our emotions on three different levels: visceral, behavioral, and reflective. The visceral level is the immediate, natural, and instinctive impressions people get from looking at utilizing a design. Good behavioral design leads to a functional product. The product might be ugly, but if it gets the job done right, it is scoring points with the user on a behavioral level. The reflective level is affected when a person consciously thinks back on using that product. The reflective emotions are not necessarily accessed when the product is in use. It is when the user is thinking.

Discussion

This was a decent read. It is hard to discuss this book as if it was new though. This is the third book by Donald Norman that has been required reading and I'm growing tired of reading numerous books about design without being able to put any of it into practice.

I think that if we were going to be putting the things that we are learning from the Norman books into practice, it would have been good to do this with the first books before reading this one. Emotional Design focuses on an entirely different part of design and it would have been nice to put the other focal points into practice before moving onto this one. There is a lot of information to take in and it will be hard to utilize it all at once instead of taking it in piece by piece.

CHI 2008 Evaluating Visual Cues for Window Switching On Large Screens

R. Hoffmann, P. Baudisch, D. Weld

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This paper evaluated the effectiveness of different cues to help direct a user's attention to a new window to focus on. The intended environment is a system set up that include multiple and large resolution monitors. Because there is so much screen real estate, the user needs this additional help to find the windows they are looking for otherwise it wastes time.

The methods of attracting attention were varied. There were four different frames that would highlight the window, there was a mask that dimmed everything except for the active window, and there were four trails that would lead to the new window.

The most effective method by itself was a trail called CenterSplash. This began in the center of the screen and tapered up to the new window. The tests were measured by the time it took a user to find the new window. When different frames and trails were combined, the best result was the CenterSplash, RedFrame, ShadowFrame, and BubbleFrame amalgam. This was only slightly better than the CenterSplash by itself when comparing times, but it scored much better on a user preference test.

The Man Who Shocked The World: The Life And Legacy Of Stanley Milgram

by Thomas Blass

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Summary:

The Man Who Shocked The World is a biography of Stanley Milgram. Milgram was a very bright child who always had an interest in science and was known to carry out many experiments. He went to college, and did predictably well. Even though he had a love for the natural sciences as a child, his graduate studies were focused on social psychology.

Milgram's most famous contribution to social psychology is his obedience experiments. In these experiments, he tested to see how long a subject would obey when put in a situation that contradicted with their morals. The subjects were told to shock another person with an increasing number of volts in order to "teach" them to remember a sequence of words. Unknown to the subjects, the person getting shocked was in on the experiment and was not actually getting shocked. The results were surprising to everyone. A very large percentage of people continued to obey the orders to shock the "learner" even after the shocks were apparently dangerous to his health.

The obedience experiments were very controversial and brought Milgram into the public eye. Even though he started other experiments, he could never fully move past the obedience experiments. His last years consisted of teaching at CUNY while studying city life.


Discussion:

The most discussed aspect of Milgram's life was whether or not his obedience experiments were ethical. It is hard for me to draw a conclusion on how I feel about this issue. The methods could have been detrimental to the subjects. The stress they were put under may have caused health issues if they had heart problems. They could have also been affected mentally if they were unable to accept the fact that they were willing to shock a person just because they were told to. Those are some of the unethical issues that I see with these experiments.

However, the participants reported that they were happy to be in the experiment and I do think the results are significant. So, since the outcome of the experiment was good, I approve of it. If it were to be done again, I think that more prescreening should be done to ensure that the participants can handle it physically and mentally.